(092112)

Fossils — The Appearance of Life

Questions:

Is
there a preponderance of fossil evidence saying evolution is a fact?

What was the thinking
concerning fossil evidence in Darwin's day?

What
can be learned today from the Cambrian era and the 'biological explosion'
of life at that time?

Was the Cambrian the
only 'explosion' to life's origins?

Short
Answer:

Today's fossil evidence
comes from many continents and is as complete as can be expected. New finds
will yet occur, but massive global collections have been acquired since Darwin's time. If the current trend holds, new fossils will either confirm types already
discovered or forms that are new distinct species. Rare evidence for apparent
intermediate forms surfaces from time to time, but just as often, upon close
examination, do not fit a logical time sequence, prove to be unique species,
or are the exceptional rare cases fitting between other distinct species. To
work, naturalism requires a multitude of intermediate forms bearing signs
of still as yet incomplete features or unformed traits. The large number of
such transitions are absent and so too is the support that Darwin, and others,
expected.

There is equally strong evidence for life forms appearing as types that are uniquely distinct without ties to a common ancestor or a 'tree
of life.' Fossil evidence can as easily fit hierarchical patterns without the tree. But further still, there is evidence
for a rapid appearance of life, such as with the Cambrian
explosion, where numerous unique body plans arise over several million
years.

Some scientists speculate
all early animal forms arose from sponges ... the jump from a [simple but
highly] unique life form to body plans with ever more complex tissues and
organs demands a competent explanation. Even sponges exhibit coordination
of cell tasks and internal complexities. So, are they really all that primitive!
And the Cambrian explosion is not the only 'event horizon' for the rapid appearance
of new forms.

Note:
With regard to the sponge example above. The role as an evolutionary
ancestral form is suggested by a recent episode of 'Shape of Life,'
a television series, produced by the National Geographic Society and
presented with the title of "Origins / Life on the Move"
(PBS television; Spring 2002). From a sponge,
we are told in sweeping language, all of evolution can be worked out. This in part is based on genetic research and findings for a single gene.
The conclusions are incomplete and unjustified. But to the uninitiated
viewer the message is clearly misleading. If anything, the show reveals how a simple organism like a sponge is in fact not so simple and quite specialized. There is little further
evidence to show how one goes from a sponge to the multiple body plans
observed for the Cambrian era.

Listen to an absolutely stunning set of presentations about the Burgess Shale fossils, the Cambrian Explosion and how science tells us a unique story from biological and astronomical data as well as from Scripture. Click on image above to order from RTB.
Download the topical outline for these presentations here.

Fossils have not closed
the Darwinian gap. They tell a different story. Appearances of features such
as a feather come all at once
and fully unique to the task of aerodynamic flight. Even the hint of evidence
that dinosaurs had feathers does
nothing to answer questions concerning presumed transitions. Fossils tell
us phyla (i.e., with unique body types) come suddenly. The same message applies
for early life, first with microbes on a young earth (ca. 3.9 billion years
ago), then for animals and later for plants.

Once in existence,
organisms that leave fossils provide evidence for stasis—that is organisms
conserve their form. They don't exhibit change as expected by evolutionists.
Form and features stay with phyla (indeed even with appearances of new species
within these hierarchical groups).

Mass extinctions are
also followed by appearances of life but without long periods of time for
redeveloping life's many types from scratch. The data are not there to seal
evolution's dominion. There is no such closure based on fossil evidence.

"The facts in favor of evolution are often held to be incontrovertible; ... Those facts, however, have been rather less forthcoming than evolutionary biologists might have hoped. If life progressed by an accumulation of small changes, as they say it has, the fossil record should reflect its flow, the dead stacked up in barely separated strata. But for well over 150 years, the dead have been remarkably diffident about confirming Darwin's theory. Their bones lie suspended in the sands of time--theromorphs and therapsids and things that must have gibbered and then squeaked; but there are gaps in the graveyard, places where there should be intermediate forms but where there is nothing whatsoever instead."

Consider This :

Fossils helped evolutionists
and taxonomists to suggest initial schemes showing how life might fit a sequential
order. That order appears to form a continuum. This, as Darwin surmised, would
one day be the conclusive proof for evolution—if in fact evolution theory
were correct. And it was obvious to Darwin, and others in his day, that evidence
for the all important transitional
intermediates was lacking. These forms were necessary to make the continuum
a reality. Without these the theory appeared flawed.

From Darwin on, a
search for evidence was not only limited to the geological strata and ancient
remains, but also to present day forms that in living form reflect ancient
natural history. Let's first look at the idea of gathering evidence from present
life forms (extant life; living fossils so to speak) and later consider ancient
fossil evidence (extinct; past life; including remains as bones or fossil
impressions left in coal, stone, or other materials) ...

In the decades
immediately following the publication of The Origin it was
widely believed that eventually the missing links would be found in
the theory of evolution confirmed. Hence the search for them became
something of an obsession; word of new fossil discoveries was greeted
with considerable excitement. ... What particularly caught the imagination
of biologists, and the general public, was the prospect of finding
"living links" in unexplored regions of the globe. Denton
(ETC) Page 158

LIVING
FOSSILS

Examples of living
fossils include the horseshoe crab and lungfish. Dr. Denton provides an interesting
discussion concerning the lungfish in Chapter 5 of 'Evolution' (ETC).
Here the living form reveals something that the typical (skeletal, bony) fossil
cannot show us. The living fossils' internal organs (which are a full compliment
of otherwise absent features in a typical fossil) can be considered with respect
to the earliest members of the same species. Lungfish and other examples,
as explained by Denton, appear to reveal a combination of traits (mosaics)
that help little to identify these organisms as intermediate forms and that
gaps between groups remain due to the 'living data' that compliments the ancient
fossil finds.

THEY DON"T SHOW
CHANGE

The real question might not be living fossils prove evolution, but
instead reveal evidence for fixity of type ... stasis ... that is, a lack
of change over time. What then of natural selection, mutations, chance, and
random variation for any species that appears now not to have changed or to have changed very little?

A number of deep sea fish species
and many invertebrates, both terrestrial and aquatic, have been discovered
over the past century but all of them have been very closely related
to already known groups, and in the few exceptional cases, when a quite
a new group of organisms has been discovered, it has invariably proved
to be isolated and distinct and in no sense intermediate or ancestral
in the manner required by evolution. Denton
(ETC) Page 159

Science
Believers Keep Looking ... Hoping

From Darwin's time
to the present, there's been an ever increasing and ongoing effort to find
missing links!

So fast has been the expansion
of the paleontological activity over the past one hundred years that
possibly 99.9% of all paleontological work has been carried out since
1860. Only a small fraction of the hundred thousand or so fossil species
known today were known to Darwin. But virtually all the new fossil species
discovered since Darwin's time have either been closely related to known
forms or, like the Poganophoras, strange unique types of unknown affinity. Denton (ETC) Page
160

And like what we'll
consider below when describing some aspects of the Cambrian explosion—phyla
seem to hit the road running—life's appearance as in certain cases is
characterized by a fossil record without antecedent forms (that is, no evidence
leading up to) the gradual progression evolution suggests ...

The molluscs, for example, the
earliest representatives of the cephalopods (the group including the
octopus and squid), of the bivalves (clams and oysters) or gastropods
(snails and slugs), etc. are all highly differentiated when they burst
into the fossil record. Denton
(ETC) Page 162

The
following diagram is from a 1924 edition of an elementary biology text book.

While Darwinists were
thinking they'd find intermediates to fill the tree of life's branches (as
noted elsewhere; as a required
to make the tree a valid concept), they instead run into timeframes that begin
with rapid appearances! Not only for the invertebrates at the Cambrian, but
also for other groups elsewhere along geologic time:

Some
65 million years ago, a riot of flowering plants burst upon the world.
Where did they come from? That question, which Charles Darwin called
an "abominable mystery," has perplexed evolutionary biologists
ever since. Now a remarkably well-preserved fossil from China promises
to unveil the murky ancestry of this most diverse group of plants,
in a surprising way. "This may be the most significant fossil
flowering plant ever found," says Peter Raven, director of the
Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. (from Fossil
Plant Hints How First Flowers Bloomed; by
Erik Stokstad; Science, May 3, 2002;
Vol 296, Page 821)

Plants and even more
life forms ...

The
story is the same for plants. Again, the first representatives of
each major group appear in the fossil record already highly specialized
and highly characteristic of the group to which they belong. Perhaps
one of the most abrupt arrivals of any plant group in the fossil record
is the appearance of the angiosperms in the era known to geologists
as the Cretaceous. Like the sudden appearance of the first animal
groups in the Cambrian rocks, the sudden appearance of the angiosperms
is a persistent anomaly which has resisted all attempts at explanation
since Darwin's time. The sudden origin of the angiosperms puzzled
him. In a letter to Hooker he wrote: "Nothing is more extraordinary
in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, then the
apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants." Denton (ETC) Page 163

And again ...

The same pattern
is true of the vertebrate fossil record. The first members of each
group appear abruptly, unlinked to other groups by transitional or
intermediate forms. Already at their first appearance, although often
more generalized than later representatives, they are all well differentiated
and already characteristic of their respective classes. Take, for
example, the way the various fish groups make their appearance. In
the space of less than fifty million years, starting about four hundred
million years ago, a high proportion of all known fish groups appear
in the fossil record. Denton
(ETC) Page 164

And still again ...

The story is the same
as for the cartilaginous fish—the sharks and rays—which
appear first some fifty million years later than most other fish groups.
As their first appearance they too are highly specialized and quite
distinct and isolated from the earlier fish groups. No fish group
known to vertebrate paleontology can be classed as an ancestor of
another; all are related to sister groups, never as ancestors and
descendants.

The pattern repeats
itself in the emergence of the amphibia. Denton (ETC) Page 164

So, what then can account
for the jumps in an otherwise gradual evolutionary process? What makes massive
alterations happen quickly to adjust some ancestral
organism's body plan and it's related functional components of physiology,
movement, mating patterns, food consumption patterns, etc.? Remember, a rapid
differentiation in an ancestral form is more than some simplistic change in
the body ... but behavior, social patterns, instincts, etc. This assumes massive
coordinated information changes at many levels. It's not so simple.

But let's say the
environment or other stimulus for change could impose massive alterations. The information base, presumably through mutations,
is thus changed. How does that get so well coordinated! If every aspect of
an organism's life encounters alterations in genetic expression, including
the embryonic developmental sequences leading to full grown organisms, well
then there is a problem that is often not fully acknowledged
by evolutionists ...

As Thomson (1988, 121-22) argues,

There
is ... a very widely held notion that evolutionary changes cannot
be caused by changes in the deeper, more fundamental events of development.
Such changes are often thought inevitably to be lethal. After all,
so the argument goes, very many variants that seem to be caused at
relatively late stages are lethal; safely changing more fundamental
stages must be even more risky. The whole notion of "macromutation"
that would significantly alter the early course of development is,
in this view, fanciful ... Despite these traditional skeptical views,
it seems inescapable that changes in early development are possible
and we have to find out how they occur, rather than attempt to dismiss
them. Nelson
(MC) Page 157

Again, if large changes
in latter stages are lethal, then changes to the developmental scheme from
the initial embryo on must certainly pose insurmountable barriers to the prospect
of survival. New and novel innovations entailing many alterations would surely
be confounded by the increased chances for the presence of lethal changes
('bad mutations') along with the beneficial traits. One lethal trait is all
that's needed to interrupt the progress of a new branch of evolution's tree.

As Nelson notes, there
are other views on solving the problem of sudden appearances. Could some type
of asymmetric condition come along just at certain times to loose the constraints
that might otherwise apply to evolution?

As Gregory Wray (1992, 131), an opponent
of this view, glosses it,

The Cambrian "explosion" of
body plans is perhaps the single most striking feature of the metazoan
fossil record. The rapidity with which classes appeared during the
early Paleozoic, coupled with much of lower rates of appearance
for higher taxa since, poses an outstanding problem in macroevolution.
One explanation for this pattern is that developmental programs
have become too constrained by interaction since the early radiation
of metazoans to allow the origin of new body plans. Nelson
(MC) Page 158

Diagrams are provided
on another page to illustrate the Cambrian
explosion leading to the unique body plans referred to here. Yet lifting
'constraints' is an ill defined solution. What might that be in a time frame
of several million years ... especially when gradual changes envisioned by
Darwin would take hundreds of millions of years to accomplish the same result!
Still others continue to consider some free form of evolution followed by
a 'lock-in phase.' Is being locked into a set of constraints the condition
Darwin presumed? And even in the locked phase, does evolution's process yield
any new phyla, even today?

During the Cambrian explosion,
argue Foote and Gould (1992, 1816), "surviving designs stabilized
through some form of genetic and developmental locking"—and thus
the "unusual speed and flexibility in an Cambrian evolution" was a
"followed by constraint upon fundamental anatomical change." This
window of opportunity for profound evolutionary change, however, has
long been closed. That the window has closed can be seen, Foote and
Gould argue, from "the fact that morphological disparity has not increased
dramatically since the Cambrian" (1992, 1816) but also (and more important
for our analytical purposes) from the extreme difficulty of observing
variable major developmental mutants today. The possibilities for
fundamental evolutionary change appeared to have narrowed considerably:

It seems very likely that the novelty
producible from a chicken is considerably less "novel" than that producible
from a poorly integrated, simple metazoan ontogeny of the later Precambrian.
... the general result of the growth of developmental inertia has
been to make the biosphere, as a whole, less amenable to change. ...
After the initial burst of body plan formation, successful profound
ontogenetic changes soon became much less common as internal and external
contingencies accumulated (i.e., as ontogenies "hardened" and ecosystems
became more "niche-packed." (McKinney and McNamara 1991,
339-40, 363)

While "significant changes in development
are required by any model for the Cambrian radiation," Douglas Erwin
(1994, 208) notes, "this [temporally asymmetric] model suggests that
such changes were a primary forcing mechanism driving the extensive
morphological innovation"—perhaps because the organization of
the early metazoan genome was in some way distinctive:

There seems to be no alternative
but to seek some unusual feature of the primitive genome that would
allow it to change in such a way that large coordinated viable morphological
changes could take place over short periods of geological time.
(Campbell and Marshall 1987, 97) Nelson (MC) Page 164

So what is the potential
for any form of life to undergo a rapid change ... if in fact there is an
antecedent form to provide the new body type or group of organisms? Building
a genome with potential meets another problem. A sudden change in the genome
(change in DNA content) implies the addition of information.
We are left to ask where this information comes from. And a sudden change
in expression requires the information be there in the first place.

Could any infusion
of information in a temporary and rapid fashion come by a random process?
And bits of misinformation represent the lethality that undoes everything
and thus blocks the potential for successful appearances! So the "unusual
features" of the primitive genome remain undefined and in some way seem
immune to complications that otherwise disrupt macroevolution.

Still, looking at fossils
has always revealed appearances of increasingly 'more sophisticated' organism
types over time. This is what is meant by fossil transitions. And certainly,
if macroevolution is true then these transitions seem to coincide with the
expectations for evolution over time.

Series
of fossil species like the horse series, the elephant series, the
camel series, the mammal-like reptile series, the early birds in and
early whales all seem to be strong evidence of evolution.

Another
class of fossil evidence comes in individual stratomorphic intermediates.

These
are fossils that stand intermediate between the group from which they
are descendant and the one to which they are ancestral—both in
stratigraphic position and in morphology. They have a structure that
stands between the structure of their ancestors and that of their
descendants. However, they are also found in the fossil record as
younger than the oldest fossils of the ancestral group in an older
than the oldest fossils of the descendant group. Wise (CH) Page 226

As recently described
by Dr. Jonathan Wells, there is good cause for caution in embracing the commonly
accepted examples for evolution. This is the hint given in the last part of
the quotation given above. Further descriptions, for example with regard to
the horse series, can be read in a book entitled Icons
of Evolution written by Dr. Wells. What is reported as evidence
to assure us that evolution is supported by the fossil record can come down
to nothing more than a misreading of the fossil record. The fossils are no
doubt very real, but the result of their misinterpretation
is certainly misleading. [We encourage a reading of this book (<bookstore link); as well as a quick look
at our separate WindowView feature article on Icons]

Dr. Wise reminds us
that the fossil record does contain intermediate species ...

Examples
include Pikaia among the cordates, Archaeopteryx among
the birds, Baragwanathia among lycopods, Ichthyostega among the amphibians, Purgatorius among the primates, Pakicetus among the whales and Proconsul among the hominids. Wise
(CH) Page 227

This evidence would
seem to say the process of evolution is at work. But this side of the evolution
story isn't without difficulties ...

First,
none of the stratomorphic intermediates have intermediate structures.
Although the entire organism is intermediate in structure, it's the combination of structures that is intermediate, not the nature
of the structures themselves. Each of these organisms appear to be
a fully functional organism full of fully functional structures.

Archaeopteryx,
for example, is thought to be intermediate between reptiles and birds
because it has bird structures (e.g., the feathers) and reptile structures
(e.g., teeth, forelimb claws). Yet the teeth, the claws, the feathers
and all other known structures of Archaeopteryx appear to be
fully functional. The teeth seem a fully functional as teeth, the
claws as claws, and the feathers as any flight feathers of modern
birds. It is merely the combination of structures that is intermediates,
not the structures themselves. Wise
(CH) Page 227

These organisms with
their combination of fully formed features are sometimes labeled mosaic
forms or chimeras. Both terms recognize
the presence of features in their complete state and not some intermediate
state. These become organisms unique to a group of their own and thus not
really intermediates:

As
a result, the total list of claimed transitional forms is very small
(the above list is very nearly complete) compared to the total number
of mosaic forms. The frequency seems intuitively too low for evolutionary
theory. The very low frequency of stratomorphic intermediates may
be nothing more than the low percentage of mosaic forms that happen
to fall in the correct stratigraphic position by chance—perhaps
because of random introduction of species by a Creator or the somewhat
randomized burial of organisms in a global deluge. Wise (CH) Page 227

Furthermore, while
in some cases order is apparent, certain groups reveal little to help in understanding
evolution's standard story.

Second,
stratomorphic intermediates tend to be found in groups that we have
already seen show a fossil-record order consistent with evolutionary
order—that is, vertebrates and plants. They are absent among
the groups of invertebrates. In some cases a series of intermediates
cannot be imagined. More often the imagined intermediates cannot have
survived. Transitions from one major group of organisms to another
are challenges to the ingenuity of even the most capable macroevolutionists.

Thus,
whereas the mosaic feature of claimed "transitional forms" presents
a challenge to evolutionary theory, that and the existence of stratomorphic
intermediates are consistent with progressive creation and
global deluge theories. Wise (CH) Page 228

Dr. Wise hints that
other types of events may serve to explain what is observed. While the latter
suggestions of progressive creation—where a Creator places life forms
on the earth—or other scenario— such as the biblical flood—are not compelling to most scientists and material naturalism, we are free to open our thinking to indeed side step the traditional storyline to consider
what else the fossil evidence may be indicating to us. Given the numerous
departures we are finding in the window's view, we are well advised to yet
again add another distinctive perspective into the larger view.

Writer / Editor: Dr. T. Peterson, Director,
WindowView.org
(090904)

Quotations from "The Creation Hypothesis"
(CH) edited by J. P. Moreland and "Mere Creation" (MC) edited by
William A. Dembski are used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box
1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com All rights reserved. No portion
of this material may be used without permission from InterVarsity Press.

Fossils
& Cambrian Explosion

Also
Consider this: Scientific data appear to be offering us a view of a creative event through
information presented in the fossil record! The sudden appearance of life
forms on Earth is exactly what is implied by the evidence.

There
are ideas and facts that if learned early on in school lead us to really
do some searching later on. For the biology or geology student, the concept
of an explosion of life forms in a relatively brief 10 million year period
is quite astounding. [And more recent estimates for
the Cambrian appearances come with even shorter times like 5 or even 3 million
years.] These are a mere instance in geologic time. Perhaps this information
is taught now, but to our understanding such teachings are not common, certainly
not in recent decades. In fact evidence from Canada and China provide immense
details for the Cambrian event. The Canadian information was initially withheld
for decades starting at the turn of the last century!

This book effectively REPLACES 'Origin of Species' and so serious is the challenge, the theory is rendered neutral to void and Darwin would have agreed. Book link.

NEW in 2014

Watch the Meyer InterviewHERE you will be impressed by what you see and hear!

Cambrian
data, first gathered in the Burgess Shale of Canada could have revolutionized
science by publication of fossil finds that first were put in the back room
collections of the Smithsonian Institution. This would have been the first
insight to a biological explosion. Like the animated cartoon here, this appearance
of more sophisticated life forms is rapid and remarkably unique compared to
the vastly simpler creatures that inhabited the earth previously.

Today,
the fossil record continues to strengthen the presence of a global Cambrian
explosion, also dubbed Biology's Big Bang, which
takes us back some 530 million years ago. Fossil experts have narrowed this
event from tens to 10 million years, possibly less. For evolutionists, the
struggle is to account for such rapid change in so brief a time. If Darwin's
form of evolution relies on 100s of millions, even a billion plus years, then
something is drastically wrong for Darwinism. Those who cannot accept anything
but the Darwinist approach have previously and are still now scrambling for
explanations. We won't give a long winded account, but the links below will
provide graphics and articles to lay out additional details, problems, and
concepts associated with the rapid appearance of life on earth. Frankly speaking,
life forms appear within their own creation day—albeit an extended 'day,'
but a discrete time frame at that.

What
use to be simply a matter of scientists saying we don't yet have all the evidence,
or the fossil record will fill in the gaps, or whatever, has turned into much
more complete information. The fossil record is actually quite extensive and
complete. Now it's time to see what the data are telling us!

Added Perspective:

Sitting
here and taking in the window's view is in part an additive process. This
brief look at fossils and ancient origins begs further exploration, but with
a critical eye. Take each interpretation you see and consider the flip side
... turn over each stone. And even though this feature article alone does
not settle everything, there is a measure of counterpoint here that when added
to the other problems and unique questions reveals that life's origin is something
special and perhaps our existence is not entirely explained by material means.
While some ridicule the genesis account in Genesis, the fossil record indicates
that appearances of several major groupings of life types come in 'discrete'
sudden appearances. Might this be biological evidence in support of the biblical
text. At the very least, all this turns one's attention from the standard
story to ask questions and to probe a bit deeper into what the evidence may
really be hinting at. We've encountered enough interesting twists on the old
story that you'll have to agree, it's worth spending a bit more time here
to see what the entire view looks like—even if different from what the
classical explanations have declared since the mid 19th-century.

(062213)

For a general listing of books, visit the WindowView Book Page for: Science and Scripture .

References of Interest

Step Up To Life

Time spent looking ... through a window on life and choice ... brings the opportunity to see in a new light. The offer for you to Step Up To Life is presented on many of the web pages at WindowView. Without further explanation we offer you the steps here ... knowing that depending on what you have seen or may yet explore in the window ... these steps will be the most important of your life ...